Electronic mail, or email, sometimes contains text that either explicitly or implicitly suggests that a recipient of the email should take some action. For example, an email body may contain text that is a uniform resource locator (URL). By explicitly including a URL in the email body, the email's sender intends for the person receiving the email to click on the URL and view the content which the URL references.
An email may alternatively or additionally contain text which implies that a recipient of the email should take action. For example, if an email sender includes the words, “let's meet tomorrow,” the sender may want to schedule a meeting for the day after the email is sent. The email receiver may want to create a calendar event on his or her calendar as a reminder about the meeting based on the email's text.
In order to help a person recognize actions that may be taken based on email text, actionable items in email text can be annotated using hyperlinks, highlighting, underlining, or some other identification that distinguishes text representing actionable items from text that is non-actionable. However, sometimes email text is annotated for actionable items which are unlikely to be acted upon by a user. For example, a user is unlikely to click on an annotation that creates a calendar event when the annotation is on a date that is already in the past.
Users should only be presented with annotations for actionable items that they are likely to act upon. Although some email systems contain email text that is annotated for user action, no systems exist that filter annotations to ensure that annotations displayed to a user have a high probability of user action. There should be a way for email systems to filter annotations so that annotations with a low probability of user action are not stored or shown.